Thursday, 5 November 2015

You're Always A WIP // Summer Goals

I was watching a TEDx talk earlier by Abbey Sy, and these things she said really hit me. I've featured her on my blog last year as her lettering is just beautiful, but this time her words are far more than beautiful. Her talk based around this idea that 'you're always a work in progress' and I thought it linked a little into what I was saying in this post about trying to stop comparing yourself to others.

In most fields of work, not just design, it's hard not to compare your work to others and knock yourself down. Even though you know they may have been doing this way longer than you, you always want to be the best. But you need to 'allow yourself to be a beginner, no one starts off being excellent'. With enough hard work and practice you can get far in life but there's always going to be someone who's practiced longer so we need to realise this and try and ignore it. Not everyone can have Jessica Hische design their lettering for them so hey it doesn't matter, if your work is good people will hire you.

So I thought I'd use my almost four months off this summer to progress my work. Obviously I'd do this anyway in some ways but I thought if I set myself some personal goals I may have more of a chance of succeeding. I've been working on some freelance projects at the moment but I want to try and create some personal projects that can target some of my weaknesses, or skills that I want to improve even more.

1. Create a drop cap alphabet.
A drop cap is one of those big letters at the start of a paragraph in fancy books, google Jessica Hische and you'll see (more on her next week). But creating an A - Z alphabet will improve my typography lettering skills and my illustrator skills which need serious improving, so double win.

2. Create a printable calendar by New Year.
A little Christmas present to you all, if I manage it that is.

3. Create some greeting cards.
I had this goal in the mid year break and only half completed it so I thought I'd bring it back and have another attempt!

4. Create a character.
I did a character design class last year and I loved it however my grades weren't the best, as I'm not amazing at drawing I couldn't get across my awesome ideas on paper. I want to improve my drawing more so I thought redoing this class slightly by designing a new character would be awesome.

I'll hopefully have a job soon so these little goals for the summer will be a nice thing to come home to and relax with. Are there any skills you really want to improve on? Are there any small ways you can improve them in any small amount of spare time you have? You can find more of Abbey's work on her blog here! I'll keep you updated with how these goals go.